Ride the Reading Railroad

I walked across the bridge in line wth the other tourists in the pre-dawn darkness, leaving behind the relative comfort of Argentina for the unknown and inconsistent world of Bolivia. Argentina´s officials were courteous, smartly dressed even at dawn, and used just enough ink to stamp my passport - in a blank box no less - and they wished me a buen viaje.
I took this all to mean, the great show of patriotic devotion to bureaucracy, that the La Quilaca border agents are not only bored, but almost certainly corrupt. The easiest way for a government official to extort money is hide behind the exact letter of the law. Everywhere, even in the States, policemen look the other way about hundreds of little offenses because it simply isn´t in their interest to enforce every statute. But in South America, where everyone is woefully underpaid, it is in their interest, if they make it so. But the tone is always the same - it isn´t extortion, it´s just following the law. I guess it´s easier to have your hands tied than to hold a gun.

Now, when you arrive in America, a stern man asks you three questions you can´t hear, stamps your passport with as little or as much ink as possible, and turns away in disgust to say ¨Next!¨as if each person he sees is another little bit of hell itself. This is the mark of an honest nation.
Bolivia, then, was something more than an honest nation - there was, and I´m not joking or exaggerating, a hobo jungle fire outside the border post. The post itself was a poorly-constructed wooden building basically empty: just a table, a stack of visas, two broken pens, and a massive portrait of Evo Morales. Evo wears the complicated necklace of the Bolivian presidency - it pales next to the one Dick Levin wears - but what struck me is that he isn´t wearing a suit. I guess I just assume leaders wear suits, so to see a president, in his official state portrait, in a sweater and slacks, struck me as a bit odd. Now, Evo, he´s not even in business casual. Heck, I get more dressed up to go on a second date.

Well, wouldn´t you know it, but Bolivia was on strike the day I arrived. Something about miners, or coca growers, or whatever - most people in South America will take any excuse to protest ineffectually. (In America, we store up that energy and have massive ineffectual protests. Much more efficient.) So the buses weren´t running, and ¨no hay tren¨was the refrain, but I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no bolivianos in my pocket.

I found a bus to Sucre, eventually, that was to leave at four. Four wasn´t so bad - it was eleven, and I was in a no-horse, no-ironhorse town, but five hours is nothing.

Well, four became around five.

And five became seven.

Around six, I had a minor argument with the ticket agent, who assured me that the bus would leave at seven on the dot. She was wrong, but by five minutes, so I´ll cut her some slack.

But as my bus was loading, order began to fall apart. The bus company had been selling tickets for buses long delayed, or possibly non-existent, and people kept coming on and sitting in seats that, for all they cared, they had bought. Since no one wanted to confront the surly Andean women piling onto the bus, the rightful ticketholders just chose new seats, or ignored their assignments, creating one of those chain-reaction seating disasters that never ends well for someone. In this case, the woman sitting in the window seat next to me was told to move - not get off the bus, just move to the aisle seat across from me. Well, this woman went crazy, yelling at the ticket lady, calling her filthy names, and physically restraining me from getting up to let her out of her seat.

So the ticket lady, the woman, and the surly Andean man whose seat was occupied shouted at each other, with a thin American unable to move, or understand exactly what people were saying. In the middle of this, a small boy, maybe seven, comes on the bus. Local children come on South American buses all the time trying to sell gum or soda or whatever. This kid decided that in the middle of a shouting match to start his routine, warbling a song of hardship in the worst whiny children-singing voice I´ve ever heard. He stopped long enough to whip out his panflutes. It was like a Marx Brothers movie, except filled with Quechua insults.

Fourteen hours after crossing the border, I was on my fourteen hour busride to Sucre. The window didn´t close, and I lost feeling in my toes sometime before dawn.